Sidekicks Read online

  I nod, but I don’t really care. Not right now. Maybe later. I keep brushing.

  Jake puts his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get out of here, Scott. Just go take a walk or something.”

  “I can’t leave her.”

  “She’s gone, man … there’s nothing—”

  “I can’t leave her!” I keep brushing.

  A woman in a HazMat suit comes over. “There’s no one else here, sir.”

  Jake sighs, then wipes his hand over his face. “Let’s wrap it up, then.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman says. “What do you want us to do about—?” She motions her head toward Allison.

  I look up at the woman. She avoids looking back at me.

  “Nothing,” Jake says.

  “Yes, sir,” she responds, then turns and walks toward the other suits.

  Jake squeezes my shoulder. “We’ll be upstairs. Exit Four. When you’re ready.”

  I nod without looking at him.

  His hand leaves my shoulder. I can hear the footsteps behind me as everyone leaves.

  I cradle Allison’s head in my arms and start to cry.

  I snap awake. My nose is all stuffed up. My eyes feel swollen. I don’t know if I’ve fallen asleep or blacked out. I don’t know if I’ve been here a couple of minutes or a couple of days. The lighting in this place is the same as it was before, but it’s a mile underground, so that doesn’t tell me anything. All I know is that I have to get out of here right now.

  I pick Allison up and head for Exit Four. After about a half-mile of sprinting through a tunnel, then climbing up ten flights of stairs, I come to a couple of doors. I kick them open and step through; I’m standing in the middle of an old warehouse. It looks a lot like the one where Allison and I first found each other … really found each other.

  Jake is there, but he’s alone. He looks at me, but doesn’t say a word.

  I lay Allison on the ground at his feet.

  Suddenly, I can’t breathe. I feel suffocated. I can’t be in here.

  Jake is nodding. I see the word GO in giant letters in my mind.

  I sprint for the doors to the outside … crash through them without slowing down. I’m outside. It’s sunny, which feels like a personal insult. I look around.

  There it is. The Brooklyn Bridge.

  I leap onto one of the lower rooftops and sprint and leap my way to the river. When I get to it, part of me wants to keep going … jump into the river and swim back to Manhattan. I skid to a stop a foot before the water and fall to my knees. I scream, but I’m too weak to put anything behind it.

  I’d cry, but I feel dried out.

  I look out at the bridge. I can feel it mocking me, for believing this could’ve ended any other way.

  to school eventually,” Jake says. “It’s been three weeks.”

  I’m lying on a bed in the room over the Berkshires’ garage. I’ve been here since …

  “And you’re going to have to eat a little more than one peanut butter and jelly sandwich every two days, especially if you expect to head into the city and run around.”

  He looks at me as if he expects me to be embarrassed that I’ve spent every night of the past three weeks scouring the city for Monkeywrench. I look at him and think about just what he can do with his expectations.

  “Oh. OK,” he says. “Thanks for the disturbing image.”

  I turn my attention back to the ceiling.

  “What if you run into Phantom?” he asks.

  I smile. “I’ll ask him how the whole hero thing has been working out for him lately.”

  Things have not gone well for Trent over the past few weeks. The “stuffed bear video” has made it around the world several times over. All the major news networks, and most of the minor ones, have aired it. And it turns out that Monkeywrench was right: Most people had a pretty strong reaction to Trent’s desire to rip the head off a dead girl. So first, Trent lost his “adoring public,” and then he lost everything else. The Feds seized all of his assets, and now they’re on standby, waiting for him to make a move. No one knows where he is.

  “I still think going out there is a bad idea,” Jake says.

  “Tell me how you’re involved in all this and I’ll think about staying.”

  “No, you won’t. You’ll leave after I tell you.”

  “Maybe.”

  Jake sighs. I’ve been asking him this question every day for the past three weeks.

  “My dad was a doctor for supers for years.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Huh. Well, that doesn’t really explain why you have a bunch of people in HazMat suits at your beck and call,” I say.

  “The feds contacted my dad a few years ago. Bodies of plus/pluses started turning up … one by one.”

  “Why him? Why not call the supers?”

  “The deaths all appeared medical in nature … accidental, or by natural causes, but they were starting to add up. The Feds wanted to keep it hush-hush until they could figure out what was going on. They didn’t want a panic on their hands.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I say. “Unless they suspected that the deaths were actually murders, and they thought a super was committing them.”

  Jake smiles. “Kind of. They were suspicious, but it wasn’t that cut and dry.” He pauses. “Apart from the report on supers that you read, how much do you really know about your powers?” he asks.

  I shrug. “I’m guessing by your question that I don’t know as much as I think I know.”

  “Well, you already know about the heart thing … but there’s something else: In physical plus/pluses like you, bone density starts to decrease at a certain age,” he says. “The average is about 35 years old. You’ll still have your powers, but your body won’t be able to support them.

  “It’s like putting a Ferrari engine in a moped,” he continues. “Fast and strong on the inside, really fragile on the outside. It’s way too easy to have an accident, and most of those accidents are fatal.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s depressing.”

  “So, most of the deaths my dad and I were investigating fell into two categories: heart attacks in young kids who accidentally pushed themselves too fast, too soon, and people thirty-five and older who met with some kind of unfortunate ‘accident.’

  “And some of them probably were accidental,” he continues, “but about a month ago, my dad and I went through the old records. Guess what we found …”

  “Unexplained needle marks on the heart attack kids,” I say.

  “Eighty-nine percent of them. And now we’re thinking, who knows how many of those older pluses got ‘accidentally’ bumped in front of trains, or down a flight of stairs.”

  “But what happened to all the ones about in their prime like Trent?”

  “We think he killed them first … quietly. He’s been the biggest ‘hero’ for a while. They trusted him, right? He probably waited for just the right opportunity, then offed them and got rid of the bodies. Most likely, he picked them off one by one. There weren’t that many of them, and communication between masked vigilantes has never been great. I’m sorry, but you physical pluses have never been great organizers.”

  “Well, what about the plus intelligences?”

  “They’ve always been harder to track,” he says. “There’s no physical characteristic that identifies us. There’s not really that many of us to begin with, and the ones that do exist aren’t exactly social. Only a few of us are even ‘out in the open’ … and I use that term generously.”

  “So there’s no way of telling how many Trent got to,” I say.

  “We know of a few whose deaths were always a little … suspicious, especially when added to the big picture. The problem is that we don’t have any way of finding new plus intelligences, or tracking the ones we know about if they don’t want to be found. So, there might be a few who, over the years, contacted Phantom with the hopes that he might mentor them. I’m guessing there’s more
than a few plus intelligences in shallow graves across the country.”

  I take a deep breath and rub my eyes. “I don’t—Why is he doing this?” I ask.

  “The same old reasons … money. Power. He had figured out a way to get both, and still be considered a hero. We think he killed off the others to make himself more of a rare commodity. The fewer supers there were, the more in demand he’d be. We also think that as he got closer to thirty-five, he started to get a little desperate … He was afraid he’d lose his position as the strongest and the fastest, which would hurt his market position, and the bottom line. His twisted ego wasn’t able to handle that … any of it.”

  Jake takes a deep breath. “There’s a commonly held belief that serial killers kill because they themselves are trying to cheat death. That’s just armchair psychology at best, though.”

  “And nobody figured this out?” I ask.

  “No. Trent spent years setting up his whole ‘good guy’ image. In the hearts and minds of the public, Phantom Justice was a good guy … a dark good guy, but a good guy nonetheless.”

  I can’t help but think of what Allison told me back in school, what feels like a million years ago. “I’ve spent years being a Goody Two-shoes,” she had said. “Years. So now, when I want to do something, I ALWAYS get the benefit of the doubt. Once you have that good girl label, you’re set.” Trent had proven her theory true, but on a much grander scale.

  “So why me?” I ask. “Why’d he help? And keep me alive?”

  “Not sure. At first you were part of his wholesome hero image—a cute young sidekick who looked up to him. You pulled in more of the under-ten crowd than he was able to get on his own. You opened up a whole new market for him. But then he realized, even before Allison, that you were becoming a threat. You were too good a person. He knew that if you found out what he was up to, you’d expose him, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s when he started his plan to kill you…and Allison.”

  Just hearing her name hurts. “But why her? She was no threat to him.”

  “We think he suspected that she was a triple-plus, and would eventually become a threat to his dominance. She might not … but Trent wasn’t willing to take that chance. He’d rather just … well …”

  There’s an awkward pause.

  “We think he’d been looking for an opportunity to kill you two for awhile,” he continues. “We think the IGO Computer thing wasn’t even that big a concern for him; his main goal was to set up a scenario where he could flush her out and then off you both.”

  I don’t even know how to react to that.

  “What he didn’t know was that Chaotic started working for us,” Jake says.

  “When?”

  “When he realized what Trent was really up to. The only thing he wanted was to protect his daughter. Needless to say, it didn’t work out so well.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If Trent is still alive, and we’re pretty sure he is, the Feds’ll slow him down,” Jake says. “But only a little. He’s a triple plus. He’ll get his hands on whatever he needs.”

  “He’s going to be gunning for me, isn’t he?” I ask.

  “He’s bound to have some nasty surprises. You really should stay put until we can put some kind of plan in place.”

  “I can’t,” I say. “I have to do this.”

  I check the clock on the wall. Six thirty in the p.m. Time to go. I stand up.

  “Here,” he says, and holds out a brown bag.

  I smile. “A lunch?”

  “Well, technically a dinner. Take it with you, just in case you decide to be sensible for a change.”

  I take the bag. “Thanks, Mom.” I put my mask on and leap out the window. It’s just after dusk, so the air is cold. I barely feel it.

  In six minutes, I’m at the train station. I hide in the shadows until the few people waiting board the train. When the doors close, I hop on top of the train. In twenty-five minutes, I’m back in Manhattan. There’s a homeless man lying outside the station. I leave the brown bag next to him and continue on my way.

  I use my grappling hook to head up to the rooftops.

  The city is quiet, just like it has been every other night. Part of me is disappointed, because I could use an outlet for this … well, I’m not even sure what to call what I’m feeling: Anger? Anxiousness? Pain? Mix in a little despair, and that comes pretty close. But there hasn’t been so much as a purse snatching. And the other part of me is glad for that, because I’m not sure what I’d do to whatever criminal I came across. I’m not sure I could maintain control.

  “So why are you out there?” Jake asks the inside of my head.

  Before I can think of a disturbing image to force him out of my head, a scream echoes through the night.

  “HELP!! Somebody please help me!!”

  “That’s why,” I whisper.

  I sprint toward the voice. It’s coming from the direction of the river. The buildings are becoming a blur beneath my feet. It’s only a few buildings away now. Almost there …

  “Hold on!” I yell.

  “HELP ME!!”

  The person screaming is standing with his back to me, on the roof of the building … Allison’s building … I stop dead. The Brooklyn Bridge twinkles in the distance. A wave of nausea washes over me.

  Monkeywrench turns around to face me, wearing the same outfit from the night in Dr. Chaotic’s lab. It’s the older one … the one that makes it impossible to tell whether Monkeywrench is a he … or a she.

  “Hello, BB, miss me?”

  “That depends,” I say. “Who are you?”

  “Who do you want me to be?”

  I rub my eyes. “I can’t do this. Are you Allison, or not?”

  Monkeywrench’s smile falters. He or she slowly shakes his or her head no.

  “Then I don’t care who you are,” I say. “I’m going home.”

  “Don’t I at least get a thank-you for saving your life?” Monkeywrench asks.

  “Fine. Thank you. All set?” I ask. “Great. Then get away from me.”

  “That may be the most horrible thank-you I’ve ever gotten.”

  “Stick around and it’ll get worse.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Too bad,” I say, “because I don’t want to talk to you.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “I don’t know who you are, but that’s someone else’s outfit,” I growl, “and you don’t deserve to wear it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me.”

  “How do you know what I do or don’t deserve?” Monkeywrench asks.

  “It’s simple. The previous Monkeywrench was the most amazing person alive. Unless you were the runner-up, you need to take that costume off.”

  “No.”

  I walk toward Monkeywrench. He or she gets into a fighting stance, but I just keep walking until I’m less than a foot away. I reach for the mask. Monkey knocks my hand away. I reach with the other hand. Monkey knocks my other hand.

  “Take it off,” I say.

  “No,” Monkeywrench responds.

  “Take it OFF!” I yell, and now I’m grabbing for it. Monkey keeps knocking my hands away. I start punching. He or she starts defending, and I feel like I’m fighting Allison again, and we start getting into a rhythm of punches and kicks and blocks and parries. But this isn’t a rhythm I want to get into with a stranger. It was mine and Allison’s, and I’m not sharing it with anyone else.

  I yell and rush Monkey, hitting him or her square in the stomach. My head is tucked under Monkey’s armpit as we hit the ground. I hear the clatter of a mask as it lands on the rooftop and skitters away.

  Monkeywrench doesn’t move. There’s no attempt to push me off and scramble after the mask before I can see. There’s no attempt to cover his or her face. He or she is just lying there, waiting for me to look.

  So I lift my head up and look.

  Allison smiles up at me.
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  I fall back onto my butt and scoot away from her. My mouth is open. My eyes are filling with tears. My fists are clenched, ready to beat the snot out of her if she’s a murderous clone or something.

  “I’m not a murderous clone,” she says, and smiles. “At least I don’t think so. Louis? Am I a murderous clone?”

  Louis’s voice fills my head. “Indeed you are not, Ms. Mendes.”

  “Louis?” I ask, looking around.

  “You can stop looking around, kid,” Louis says. “I’m in your head.”

  “You’re a—?”

  “Yup.”

  “And a—?”

  “Yeah, and that too.”

  I look at Allison “And you’re—?”

  “Alive? Very much so.”

  “But the body …”

  “It was a dummy,” she says.

  “But I felt it. I held it. It … felt like you.”

  “I know. My father built it for just such an occasion. He cloned my skin for it. Gahh. I can’t think about. Gives me the creeps.” She shudders.

  I look away from her, at the ground, anywhere but her face. I can’t process all this. I feel my brain shutting down.

  “I know this is a lot to swallow,” she says.

  “Oh, ya think?”

  “I’m really sorry, Scott. This wasn’t my idea.”

  “It was mine,” Jake says, also broadcasting in my head, “and if I knew you were going to throw it all away, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

  “Oh great!” I yell. “So are all the plus intelligences out to make me miserable, or just you three?”

  “Well, some of us plus intelligences understand the importance of making a plan and sticking to it, even if people get hurt!” Jake yells. “We don’t go around tossing away well-thought-out—and successful I might add—plans at the drop of a hat!”

  “This is not the drop of a hat!” Allison yells back. She looks at me. “I couldn’t do that to you, Scott. Not for another second. It—” She stops. Her eyes tear up. “I can’t see you hurt like that.”

  “He was supposed to think you were dead!” Jake yells. “Trent is most likely still alive. And whether Scott likes it or not, they share a past! They have a bond! It’s that much easier for Trent to know what Scott is thinking … and right now, Scott is practically broadcasting to the world that you’re alive!”